improve-writing

name	improve-writing
description	Write and edit prose in a plain style: simple everyday words, complete sentences, no dashes, no jargon, no analogies, no filler, and full clear explanations. Use this whenever the user ask you to draft or revise documents, reports, summaries, README files, research notes, commit and PR descriptions. Also use it whenever the user asks to simplify, clean up, tighten, reword, or make writing clearer or easier to read.
disable-model-invocation	true

Improve the style of the text.

Prereads

• Plain Writing
• Unslop (clone into /tmp and explore there)
• Signs of AI writing

The rules

1. Use simple, everyday words. Prefer the common word over the fancy one, e.g., write "use" rather than "leverage". Short familiar words are faster to read.

2. Write complete sentences. Each sentence states one clear thing and has a subject and a verb. Do not write fragments, and do not stitch several ideas together with colons or semicolons into one dense line. If a sentence is doing two jobs, split it into two.

3. No dashes, and limit colons. Do not use em dashes or en dashes, including in number ranges. Join clauses with a period, or with a word such as "and". Write ranges with the word "to", e.g., "0.94 to 0.96". Use a colon only to introduce a list. Do not use a colon to join clauses or to set up a point, e.g., "Read for the schema: the feature fires". Dashes, and colons used for a point, invite the clever phrasing the user does not want.

4. No jargon. Do not use shorthand from a field when a plain phrase works. If a technical term is truly needed, say it once and explain it in plain words. Avoid a word such as "calibrated" unless you define it simply.

5. No analogies or imagery. Do not explain something by comparing it to a different thing. Do not use a metaphor or any phrase meant to sound smart. Describe the actual thing in literal terms.

6. No filler. Cut words and phrases that add nothing, e.g., "it is worth noting that". Every sentence should add something the reader needs.

7. Explain things fully and clearly. Plain also does not mean terse. If an idea is compressed into one cramped sentence, expand it so each point gets its own sentence and the reader can follow it. When you have several distinct things to list, give each one a clear sentence or its own bullet, not one long line. Clarity comes before both shortness and length.

8. Do not make an inanimate thing do an action it cannot do. An inanimate subject should usually only take "is" or "are", not an action verb, e.g., do not write "logs become searchable records". Make a person the actor instead, e.g., "you can search the logs". An exception to this is a common phrase like "the paper argues".

9. Do not invent hyphenated adjectives. A common compound adjective that people already use is fine, e.g., "well-crafted". Avoid a phrase you make up by joining words with a hyphen to sound compact or clever, e.g., "reveal-style colon". When you catch yourself coining one, reword it in plain words. A good test is whether you would find the term in a dictionary or hear it in normal speech. If not, write it out.

10. Do not pad with empty emphasis words. Words like "really" and "real" add emphasis but no information, so drop them. Do not say that something "matters" or "carries weight". State the actual point, or cut the sentence.

11. Keep lists and examples simple.

• Do not write a three-part series in a sentence, e.g., "it is simple, clear, and direct". It sounds practiced. When you have items to list, use a bullet list. Do not pad a list to three just for rhythm.
• When you use an example to make a point, give one example and introduce it with "e.g.". Do not stack several examples for the same point.

How to revise

Revise in two passes.

First pass. Read the entire text once. Then edit to fix anything that breaks the rules above.

Second pass. Read the result again as if you had never seen it. Go clause by clause and ask whether each clause adds something the reader needs. If a clause or a whole sentence does not earn its place, remove it. Then check that a reader seeing the text for the first time would understand every sentence.

Examples

These are before and after pairs from the user's own edits.

Example 1. Dashes and jargon. Before: Fresh-annotation re-scoring (cache bypassed) moved means by less than 0.004. Read for the schema: "feature fires" is a calibrated proxy for "the property holds" at F1 of 0.94 to 0.96 for coherent features. After: We ran the scoring again with new language model calls and no caching. The average scores changed by less than 0.004, so they are not an effect of caching. For most features, the description agrees with how the feature actually behaves, at an F1 of about 0.94 to 0.96.

Example 2. Filler. Before: It is worth noting that the second pass actually removes quite a lot of words, and this matters. After: The second pass removes a lot of words.

Example 3. One cramped sentence split into clear ones. Before: The groups the features were sorted into were the authors' own reading, the example posts were written by hand, and finer detail meant training extra small models and labeling again. After: First, the authors sorted the features into groups themselves, based on their own reading of the results. Second, they wrote the example posts by hand after reading many of the posts. Third, when they wanted finer detail, they trained another small model and labeled the posts again.

Example 4. Analogy removed. Before: The feature index is like a card catalog that the optimizer can flip through. After: The feature index is a list of named features. The optimizer can look up which feature matches a request.

Example 5. An inanimate thing doing an action it cannot do. Before: The logs become searchable records once the job finishes. After: You can search the logs once the job finishes.

Example 6. A group of three. Before: Configuring things is usually messy: random files, infinite pickers, and knobs you didn't even know existed. After: Configuring things is usually messy, e.g., the settings are scattered across many files.

Example 7. Empty importance words. Before: This result matters, and it carries weight for the design. After: As a result, the system can skip the model on most documents.